We select, you rate. Ratings are on a 20-point scale, and they're based on feedback from verified Tablet guests. If a hotel's rating falls below 16, it's gone — so your post-stay review is actually our most important quality-control tool.

Ratings Breakdown

Rooms17.5

Public Spaces17.5

Service17.5

Overall17.5

181

Reviews

Most recent review:

What I liked:

The hotel is central. Very well appointed with large rooms and comfortable beds. We have stayed there many times over the past 5 years. This trip the air conditioning did not work. Both nights we had a horrible nights even with the windows open could not sleep. We complained to maintenance the first day, they fixed it but it still collapsed

What the hotel could do better:

1. Ask the front desk clerk who checks you out to listen and not justify wrong. She kept arguing.

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Hotel Description

In London, the hotel world’s majorest of major leagues, even the big chains know which way the wind is blowing — away from that fusty manor-house look, and toward something altogether more clean-lined and contemporary. Nobody’s about to mistake the old May Fair for the Sanderson, but after a top-to-bottom £70m renovation, it’s looking shockingly up-to-date.

It’s plain they’ve learned some lessons from the new breed of design hotels: the May Fair Bar is stylish and modern, packing in a hip West End crowd. Quince, a modern European restaurant with Moroccan influences, forgoes the usual formality of five-star dining for a more casual shared-plate approach, while the Cigar Room, encased in stainless steel mesh that allows the space to breathe, offers a nicely curated selection of rare and fine hand-rolled cigars. Upstairs, the bedrooms are still oversized and as luxurious as they come, and now they’re utterly modern too, slightly minimalist in muted earth tones. And of course they’re packed with all the modern must-haves, from forty-inch Samsung Smart TVs to high-end bath products.

A 201-seat private screening room is a rarity, to be sure, but the May Fair’s spa is its crown jewel. It’s vaguely Asian in design (as are all spas these days) and completely over-the-top — the best place for a mud bath after a long day of splashing cash all over the West End. Or all over the hotel — the May Fair’s own Palm Beach Casino is among the biggest in town, and its atmosphere of old-world glamour is an inducement to high-stakes playing.